A robust–accurate estimation of fluid flow is the main building block of a distributed virtual flow meter. Unfortunately, a big leap in algorithm development would be required for this objective to come to fruition, mainly due to the inability of current machine learning algorithms to make predictions outside the training data distribution. To improve predictions outside the training distribution, we explore the continual learning (CL) paradigm for accurately estimating the characteristics of fluid flow in pipelines. A significant challenge facing CL is the concept of catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we provide a novel approach for how to address the forgetting problem via compressing the distributed sensor data to increase the capacity of the CL memory bank using a compressive learning algorithm. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach provides around 8% accuracy improvement compared to other CL algorithms when applied to a real-world distributed sensor dataset collected from an oilfield. Noticeable accuracy improvement is also achieved when using our proposed approach with the CL benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art accuracies for the CIFAR-10 dataset on blurry10 and blurry30 settings of 80.83% and 88.91%, respectively.

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Towards Building a Distributed Virtual Flow Meter via Compressed Continual Learning

Generalizing the application of machine learning models to situations where the statistical distribution of training and test data are different has been a complex problem. Our contributions in this article are threefold: 1) we introduce an anchored-based out-of-distribution (OOD) Regression Mixup algorithm, leveraging manifold hidden state mixup and observation similarities to form a novel regularization penalty; 2) we provide a first of its kind high-resolution distributed acoustic sensor dataset that is suitable for testing OOD regression modeling, allowing other researchers to benchmark progress in this area; and 3) we demonstrate with an extensive evaluation the generalization performance of the proposed method against existing approaches and then show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. We also demonstrate a wider applicability of the proposed method by exhibiting improved generalization performances on other types of regression datasets, including Udacity and Rotation-MNIST datasets.

Peter James Thomas

Papers

Better Modeling Out-of-Distribution Regression on Distributed Acoustic Sensor Data Using Anchored Hidden State Mixup

The subsurface thermal state of Svalbard and implications for geothermal potential

Towards Building a Distributed Virtual Flow Meter via Compressed Continual Learning